"There never could be too much as far as I am concerned," protested Olive. "What do you mean by too much?"
"Well, for instance, a two-hundred mile run in a boat of about that size," replied the Wireless Officer, indicating the centre-board gig. "I tried that sort of thing once, but the boat never reached her destination."
"Tell me about it," commanded Miss Baird. "Were you single-handed?"
"No," replied Peter. "There were three fellows and a girl. We got wrecked."
For nearly three-quarters of an hour Olive listened intently to Mostyn's account of the escape from the pirate island in the North Pacific; the narrator with his natural modesty touching but lightly upon his share of the desperate enterprise.
"And where is the girl now?" inquired Olive.
"She married my chum Burgoyne," replied Peter. "I had a letter from him when we were at Cape Town. Burgoyne is a jolly lucky fellow."
"We had a sailing-boat of our own once," said Olive, her mind going back to those far-off days before she had a stepmother to make things unpleasant for her. "I used to sail quite a lot on the Tamar when we lived at Saltash."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Peter to himself. "I felt certain I'd seen her before, but I couldn't for the life of me say where."
For a few moments he remained silent, making a mental calculation.